Author's sad homecoming

AT 75, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is returning to the Russia of his dreams. The author is about to wake up to a less wonderful reality. But that matters less than another reality: that the new Russia is ready to open itself for his inspection.

After 20 years in exile in the countryside of Vermont in the United States, the man who detailed the horrors of the Soviet prison camps, and gave the English language the word ''gulag'' to describe them, is going home. But the image he built of the new Russia - free of Communism and imbued with traditional values - is not the Russia of Boris Yeltsin. Mr Solzhenitsyn knows that. But he is about to embark on a voyage of reacquaintance with his old country and may yet reward us with devastating new insights.

In a way, the saddest aspect of his return is that he is travelling with a BBC film crew. The power of Mr Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of the gulag is in the written word. No ephemeral TV film, and few cinema blockbusters, can match a book's lasting ability to impress each new generation of readers. Smuggled books are more dangerous to a totalitarian regime than films which cannot be played back in secret.

Even videos lack the book's value in reaching secret audiences. For the West, a book, The Gulag Archipelago, brought home the message of the cruelty of Stalin's years, its torture of mind and soul as well as bodies, in a way in which no film could have done. It took the novel to portray the detail (and thus the horrific extent) of the human suffering and the inhuman barbarity of that era.

But Mr Solzhenitsyn's return also marks a turning point. It is not only the culmination of his long years of hope for a return to a country rid of Soviet oppression, but a symbol of triumph for those lived to see that corrupt system dead and buried. That it could happen within his lifetime and so soon after his book shaped the West's image of the Soviet Union forever is a triumph neither he nor anyone else could have expected.